Quilts That Show Swatches Of Richness

April 26, 1998|By MATT DAMSKER; Special to The Courant

How did Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns or Robert Rauschenberg miss out on the flag-like pop possibilities of the American quilt? Imagine a silk-screened Warhol comforter made of multiple Elvises, Jackie O's and Marilyns, or a Johns bull's-eye stitched repeatedly upon a coverlet.

Such coolly detached imagery wed to such an article of functional warmth would certainly have added one more ironic dimension to the output of the pop masters.

Instead, the quilt has kept mainly to the realm of unironic craft and folk traditions, although it realized one of its most profound metaphors of human connection and comfort with the emergence of the recent AIDS quilt. (A section of that quilt will be on display Monday evening through Thursday at the Field House at Trinity College in Hartford.)

Still, quilts haven't crossed over very far, it seems, from quaint Pennsylvania Dutch or other pioneer associations, which is precisely why the display of contemporary art quilts now at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich is such an eye-opener.

Organized by the Lubbock Fine Arts Center of Texas, ``Pieces, Parts and Passion: The Quilted Medium'' mixes all manner of artistry in various efforts to transcend mere quiltiness, if you will. These pieces affirm that whenever the modern sensibility reaches toward a traditional medium, it can reach some newly playful heights. Indeed, the best pieces here use quilting as a point of total departure for a fanciful embroidery of ideas, and for a kind of liberated kitchen-sink indulgence of materials.

Sue T. Alvarez, for example, turns a quilt into her ``Landing Strip for Gay Martians,'' all pieced together and appliqued in wildly contrasted color and swirls of stitching, with charms and buttons, beads and glass attached like a child's offering of precious junk to the imagined visitors from the sky.

Similarly, Therese May's ``Playful Contemplation,'' with its glittery encrustation of rocks, jewels and broken crockery, takes its inspiration from the obsessive folk-art of the Watts Tower.

And James Acord and Susan Shie evoke the garrulous spirituality of the Rev. Howard Finster's painting in their ``Night Chant -- A Green Quilt,'' which crazy-quilts beads, tooled leather, gemstones, glow-in- the-dark paint and sweetly poetic homilies (``Eyes that send love -- eyes that nurture . . . Eyes are the soul relating''). The result is a funky new prayer shawl of Judeo-Christian sentiment, freed of the formalities and institutional mustiness of tapestries or manuscript.

But other works sell short their potential richness by relying on the merely pictorial -- such as Lisa Berman's vividly wrought image of a mother and her three sons, in which the matriarch stands biblically, staff in hand. The polyglot quilting of color and fabric is appealing but ultimately serves a static image that may as well have been committed to canvas.

And Ann Brauer's ``Fractured Glass'' suffers from its literalism; the shard-like swatches fitted together are so well tailored to a quilted concept that they don't subvert the process in any startling way.

Then there's Wendy C. Huhn, who offers a witty architecture of domesticity by taking different pasta shapes and bricking them into a quilt. But her jokey ``Hot Flash,'' built from Warhol-ish product images of ``Endocreme Hormone Creme,'' seems heavy-handed (and suggests why Warhol wasn't drawn to this ``warm'' medium).

Much better are the close parallel lines of twisted fabric with which Caryl Bryer Fallert creates an op- art effect, matching the illusory, two-dimensional frisson of op painting to the tactile, 3-D essence of quilting. It's in just such leaps of imagination that these neo-quilters are piecing together a fresh vision.